This is just one of the quirks that make this venerable Manhattan meat-eater’s sanctuary on West 36th Street so endearing. It was opened independently in 1885, when the area was part of the
theatre district, but before that it was part of The Lamb’s Club, an actor hangout.

Open the heavy wooden door and you’re entering the palpable past–dining rooms of wood-panelled, perpetual dusk courtesy of the frosted glass windows, and of ceilings decorated wall-to-wall with
the largest collection of churchwarden pipes in the world. These hard-clay, thin-stemmed, small-bowled implements–you’ve seen them in Dutch paintings–were allegedly the remedy for driving away
“evil homourse of the brain.” They’re a remnant of the days when men would leave their favorite warden pipe at their favorite inn. Keens once had a Pipe Club of more than 90,000 members, among
them Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Billy Rose, Grace Moore, Albert Einstein, George M. Cohan, J.P. Morgan, Stanford White, John Barrymore, David Belasco, Adlai Stevenson, General
Douglas MacArthur and “Buffalo Bill” Cody. But today we’re not here to speak of smoke, but of smoky. Meaning the Keens single-malt scotch list, which at 308 different labels, “plus 10
downstairs that we’re holding back,” says the suave Brandon Falzone, one of the list’s two keepers, is the largest at any restaurant in Manhattan.

The list requires a triptych menu, and is divided into the traditional single-malt genres (Highland, Highland-Speyside, Lowland, Islay, Island, and Campbeltown, plus “Single Malts From Unexpected
Places” such as Texas, India, Japan, and Virginia.) The bottles themselves form a grandstand behind the tin-ceilinged bar, with more decks below the sightline. The collection was started in the
1980s by owner George Schwarz as a way of making Keens stand out at a time when the neighborhood was going south. (It’s now going north.) What you get at Keens is access to a single-malt
museum, with some bottles that are endangered species. “The industry is changing,” says James Conley, a 17-year-veteran and the list’s senior curator as it were, referring to the fact that
distilleries are now increasingly making scotch ready to drink now–”non-aged and less use of sherry barrels, all geared toward Millenials,” he says. He offers the heavily peated Octomoor as an
example of a single-malt that lives up to novice preconceptions.

What you want to go for at Keens are the single-malts from distilleries deceased, signified by an asterisk that means “going, going”, but that live on here for now (Brora 35 Years, for
example). The fun part of the menu is to pin the tail on the donkey–point to something and ask Brandon or James to explain your shot in the dark. I went for the Ledaig 10-Year-Old from the
Isle of Mull, and it lived up to Brandon’s precis (“lightly smoked, fleet on the palate”). As for this duo’s personal favorites, Conley characterizes the MacAllan 25-Year-Old ($174) as “a little
piece of Nirvana”, but also cites the Highland Park 18 ($22, from the Orkneys) and the Caol Ila 15 ($22, from Islay) as value stand-outs. As for Brandon, he’s a Springbank man, and suggests the
Cask Strength 16-Year Local Barley ($30), an example of the new single-malt locavore trend, making the scotch from barley locally grown.

But then, don’t ask for advice. Act the part. Order the Mortlach Rare Old ($24), the Mortlach 18-Year-Old ($46), or the Clynelish James MacArthur ($20, aged 12 years on Bourbon casks and another
‘going, going’ scotch). Says Conley, “I’d take you for a connoisseur.”